Corrections Canada is Sentenced to Fail, Again and Again

"Correctional Service Canada has finally responded to the coroner’s inquest into the 2007 death of a troubled young woman who spent more than 1,000 days in solitary confinement before choking to death in an isolation cell as correctional officers watched, unwilling to help her. The agency quietly put the response online late Thursday – a full year after the inquest made its 104 recommendations – and then went back to ignoring the world outside its walls.

Feel free to read the report. If you do, though, do not hope to be uplifted. Once you get past the self-important acronyms (CRIMP, IMP, RSPMC) and the sly appeals for public sympathy in CSC’s response to the “absolute tragedy” of Ashley Smith’s death, you will be left with the sinking feeling that what happened to that 19-year-old girl will happen again, if it hasn’t already.

That’s because the response reinforces that fact that the agency that employs 18,000 people to look after 22,000 federal offenders, including more than 15,000 inmates, is allowed by the government to work outside the reach of public oversight. It answers only to itself. The federal prisons ombudsman, Howard Sapers, can make recommendations. So can the federal Auditor-General. So can a well-meaning inquest jury. But they are among the very few public advocates that prisoners have, and nothing they say is binding."

Christie Blatchford: Ashley Smith’s belief that ‘death is the only way out’ not the true lunacy of her case

The lunacy of what happened to teenager Ashley Smith is sometimes so staggering that even now, in month three of the Ontario coroner’s inquest probing her death, it utterly beggars belief.

On Oct. 18, 2007, the day before Ashley asphyxiated in her isolation cell, the teenager told a prison psychologist she had “lost hope of ever getting out of prison and believes that death is the only way out.”

The comments are found in the notes of Dr. Cynthia Lanigan, a psychologist at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women, the final stop on Ashley’s grand tour of federal prisons and hospitals.

But this is not where the madness lies: Dr. Lanigan recommended the 19-year-old be constantly monitored and noted she remained “a high risk for suicide.”

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Ashley Smith strapped to chair for 8 hours after banging her head

Guards at a Nova Scotia prison used “extraordinary force” when they strapped Ashley Smith in a specially designed restraining chair for eight hours in 2007 for banging her head on the floor of her cell, says the lawyer for the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

Jurors at the inquest into Smith’s October 2007 death viewed dramatic video Tuesday showing the teen being strapped into a chair at the Nova Institution because she was harming herself in her segregation cell.

“It’s an extraordinary deprivation of her liberty. She was in that chair for eight hours strapped in like that. It’s an extraordinary use of force on someone who was essentially compliant with them,” Breese Davies said in an interview outside the inquest.

“There doesn’t seem to have been any effort to take measures to de-escalate the situation with her,” Davies said.

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Christie Blatchford: Coralee Smith describes the harrowing deterioration of her daughter, Ashley

A warm, wee slice of the Maritimes has arrived at the Ontario coroner’s inquest examining the grim prison death of teenager Ashley Smith.

With a gracious handshake and proffered condolences from the presiding coroner, Dr. John Carlisle, Ashley’s mother Coralee swept into court Wednesday.

Within 10 minutes, speaking with a soft New Brunswick accent, Ms. Smith from the witness stand was proudly introducing her grandson, Jordan, and her other daughter, Donna, to the small room.
The trio travelled from the family’s home in Moncton for Ms. Smith’s appearance here. Though a so-called “party” with standing at the inquest, which means she is represented by a lawyer, she is testifying here of her own volition.

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Christie Blatchford: Prison management told guards, if Ashley Smith ‘dies, it’s her own fault, it’s by misadventure,’ court hears

The absurdity of it, the eye-rolling madness of it, never seemed to resonate with anyone at the Grand Valley Institution for Women.

There, the powers-that-be had two basic options: Search Ashley Smith until the cows came home and keep her safe from herself, or follow the doctrine of “least restrictive” which, in the name of female bodily integrity, permeates the women’s side of Canadian federal corrections.

At its most simple, the choice was between a live teenager with injured pride or a dead one with intact dignity.

Consider what I think of as The Glass Conversation.

It took place on Sept. 22, 2007, less than a month before Ashley asphyxiated in her isolation cell at Grand Valley in Kitchener, Ont.

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Christie Blatchford: Jury watches shocking prison cell video of Ashley Smith’s life slipping away

For the first time, the video depicting the asphyxiation of teenager Ashley Smith in a federal prison has been played in full in public.

Until Monday, when a five-member jury watched the 75-minute video at the coroner’s inquest examining Ashley’s Oct. 19, 2007, death at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women, only limited excerpts had been played, and only in court proceedings and a CBC documentary.

It is the first 15 minutes or so which are most shocking because what they document are the young woman’s dying, as the pauses between her laboured breaths grew ever-long until they finally stopped.

The camera was then being operated by Valentino (Rudy) Burnett, a correctional officer who was temporarily working at Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women.

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Ashley Smith case: Time to end ‘the ugly spirit of our penal system’

Ashley Smith was arrested when she was 14 for throwing crab apples at a mail carrier. In the five years Ms. Smith spent in the penal system as a result of the one incident (which dominoed into a series of ‘institutional charges’) she was bounced from institution to institution, suffered a range of abuses and potentially illegal treatments, including forcible injection with medication against her will, long periods of solitary confinement, being duct-taped, hooded, tasered and pepper-sprayed. Howard Sapers, the national correctional Investigator, concluded in his own inquiry into Ms. Smith’s case that she was routinely denied adequate mental-health care.

Ms. Smith died on Oct. 19, 2007, after choking to death in her prison cell. Amplifying this tragedy, several guards stationed outside the door of her cell were under orders not to intervene.

Attempts to investigate Ms. Smith’s death speak volumes about the ugly spirit of our penal system. Instead of an honest admission that there are deep and longstanding problems with the structures of punishment and an accompanying resolve to actually address these problems, the wagons were quickly circled.

The first inquiry was halted after allegations that its terms and processes were anything but fair and transparent. A second inquest that begun in 2012 resumed this week. This inquiry is also mired in controversy. Lawyers for the Correctional Service of Canada made repeated motions to have various pieces of evidence speaking to Ms. Smith’s mistreatment blocked. Included in their bid was the footage of Ms. Smith being duct-taped and hooded on a plane as well as the video showing her held down on a gurney by several guards as a nurse injects her with an unknown substance. In this video, Ms. Smith’s protestations are clearly audible.

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The author of this Globe piece, Dawn Moore, is a graduate of the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies.  Tom

Christie Blatchford: Ashley Smith’s prison guards in ‘shroud of misdirection and fear’

They watched as blood vessels broke in her face or eyes. They were reduced to counting the number of breaths she took. They saw her nose bleed and her face turn purple.

And yet when guards at the Grand Valley Institute for Women in Kitchener, Ont., tried to rush into Ashley Smith’s segregation cell to cut off the makeshift ligatures around her neck and save her life, they were occasionally physically stopped by superiors or told to pull back and “re-assess,” and if they went in anyway, they were warned, verbally and in writing, that they would face disciplinary hearings for excessive use of force.

Perhaps most cruelly, in an email sent to managers just eight days before Smith’s death, Cindy Berry, then the acting warden at Grand Valley, criticized the guards for “not removing warmth” — ordinary human warmth — from their interactions with Smith. Ms. Berry had reviewed video of an incident where five female guards and a male had gone into Smith’s cell to remove a ligature. In correctional lingo, this constitutes a “use of force” — indeed, physical force was often required to get the ligatures off Smith — and sets in motion the requirement for video and a great whack of paperwork.

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Rae calls for public inquiry into Ashley Smith’s prison death

Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae is calling for a public inquiry to get to the root of the tragedy that befell Ashley Smith, the troubled teen who choked to death in her prison cell as guards stood watch.
And he wants the inquiry to go beyond the particulars of Ms. Smith’s death to expose the general inability of the prison system to cope with mentally ill offenders.

Mr. Rae made the call Thursday after concluding the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper won’t on its own reveal everything it knows about the Smith case.

He expressed frustration that the Conservative government has not responded to his repeated questions as to whether more videos exist documenting the mistreatment of Ms. Smith and other mentally ill offenders.

Since the release last week of two disturbing videos showing Ms. Smith being restrained with duct tape and injected with powerful anti-psychotic drugs against her will, the government has said it has ordered corrections officials to co-operate fully with a coroner’s inquest into Ms. Smith’s death.

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Treatment of female inmate ‘outrageous and barbaric,’ lawyer tells coroner’s hearing

Ashley Smith, pictured in an undated photo, took her own life in a federal institution on October 19, 2007.

Diana Zlomislic Staff Reporter

The story of Ashley Smith is “the most outrageous and barbaric example of the mistreatment of a mentally ill person this country has ever witnessed,” her family’s lawyer told a coroner’s court on Monday.

“It took a long time to torture Ashley Smith and it will take a long time to explore the circumstances of her death,” Julian Falconer said.

Lawyers for Smith’s family and the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies are in Toronto this week arguing that Deputy Chief Coroner Dr. Bonita Porter should broaden the scope of the inquest into the teen inmate’s death, which they say was brought on by brutal conditions of confinement and a series of illegal transfers within the “corrupt” federal prison

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